May 8th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz

In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him… they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! – Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, laid bare the dismal conditions and unsanitary standards of the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book led to broad-based regulations in the meat packing industry with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. More than one-hundred years later, and even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, working conditions at meatpacking plants remain extremely difficult. Workers are exposed to high noise levels, frigid temperatures, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, and hazardous chemicals, and they experience a significant level of musculoskeletal disorders. These workers are critical to supporting America’s meat and poultry dependent society. And now COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire through meatpacking plants across the Midwest. 

As part of his desperate attempt to get the economy running again, (and perhaps his love of hamburgers), Trump has declared that meatpacking plants are essential operations that must be kept open at all costs. . Working in close quarters and without federal mandates for improving testing and safety conditions such as barriers between stations on assembly lines, meatpacking plant workers are treated as fungible and expendable. The costs to the health of the workers – and the communities where they live, are overwhelming with large clusters of coronavirus reported cases reported in plants in Iowa, South Dakota, Colorado, Texas and Nebraska. 

As Pete Seeger once sang about Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War, we are “knee deep in the Big Muddy, [and] the big fool said to push on.” In this case the Big Muddy is the meat packing plants where more than 10,000 workers have tested positive for coronavirus, and at least three dozen deaths have been reported.  

Last week, President Trump issued an executive order classifying meatpacking plants as critical under the Defense Production Act, meaning that plants would be required to remain open. It is more than curious that Trump has refused to invoke this Act for the manufacture of PPE and corona virus testing equipment. “We thank the Administration for acknowledging the important role food companies serve and ensuring that our food supply will remain resilient during these unprecedented times,” JBS — a Brazilian-owned multinational that brings in $50 billion annually as the world’s largest meat processor — wrote in a statement praising the move.

A 2004 Human Rights Watch report titled BLOOD, SWEAT, AND FEAR Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants pointed out that “Meatpacking work has extraordinarily high rates of injury. Workers injured on the job may then face dismissal. Workers risk losing their jobs when they exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively in an attempt to improve working conditions. And immigrant workers—an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry—are particularly at risk. Language difficulties often prevent them from being aware of their rights under the law and of specific hazards in their work. Immigrant workers who are undocumented, as many are, risk deportation if they seek to organize and to improve conditions.” 

According to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than 40 percent of meatpackers are Latino and 25 percent are African American. The League of United Latin American Citizens estimates 80 percent of those working in meat processing plants are undocumented or refugees.

Wired magazine’s Megan Molteni reported that “According to the CDC’s latest report, the chief risks to meatpackers come from being in prolonged close proximity to other workers. A thousand people might work a single eight-hour shift, standing shoulder to shoulder as carcasses whiz by on hooks or conveyor belts. Often, workers get only a second or two to complete their task before the next hunk of meat arrives. The frenzied pace and grueling physical demands of breaking down so many dead animals can make people breathe hard and have difficulty keeping masks properly positioned on their faces.”

Mother Jones magazine’s Esther Honig and Ted Genoways recently reported that, “immigrants from Latin America and later refugees from countries like Somalia and Myanmar, who today make up half of the workforce at all of America’s meatpacking plants. Roughly half of those immigrants are undocumented.”

As Honig and Genoways pointed out, “significant COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred at JBS’s beef processing plants in Souderton, Pennsylvania; Plainwell, Michigan; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Cactus, Texas; and Grand Island, Nebraska. Including Greeley, [Colorado] these account for six of the company’s nine beef plants nationwide. Similar outbreaks have hit three of its five pork processing plants.” Meanwhile, “dozens of plants owned by other companies, including Tyson Foods and Smithfield, have seen outbreaks among their workers and in surrounding communities. All told in the US, per data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, at least 99 meatpacking and processed food plants have confirmed cases of COVID-19, and at least 20 meatpacking plants and five processed food plants are currently closed. At least 6,832 workers are confirmed sick and at least 25 have died.”

Adherence to Interim guidelines issued by the CDC and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), “is entirely voluntary and explicitly allows asymptomatic workers who have been exposed to COVID-19 to remain on the line.“

According to Honig and Genoways, “In recent years, meatpackers have pushed for loosening of government oversight to allow production lines to move faster, yielding more meat and greater profits with less inspection by the Department of Agriculture and less oversight of work conditions by OSHA.”

The intensity of Trump’s focus on keeping the meatpacking food chain humming was highlighted in a call during which HHS Secretary Alex Azar blamed workers’ living conditions for bringing COVID-19 into the plants, telling “a bipartisan group that he believed infected employees were bringing the virus into processing plants where a rash of cases have killed at least 20 workers and forced nearly two-dozen plants to close, according to three people on the April 28 call,” Politico’s Adam Cancryn and Laura Barron-Lopez reported.

"’He was essentially turning it around, blaming the victim and implying that their lifestyle was the problem,’ said Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.), who told Politico that Azar’s comments left her deeply concerned about the administration’s priorities in fighting the pandemic. ‘Their theory of the case is that they are not becoming infected in the meat processing plant, they're becoming infected because of the way they live in their home.’"

During a meeting with Trump and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently stated that he expects U.S. meatpacking plants to fully resume operations within a week to 10 days.